2/08/2012

Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German-Jewish philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable beingThe Communist Manifesto (1848) andCapital (1867–1894);some of his works were co-written with his friend, the fellow German revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels.

English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic novels and characters.

Many of his writings were originally published serially, in monthly instalments, a format of publication which Dickens himself helped popularise. Unlike other authors who completed novels before serialisation, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialised. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the public looking forward to the next instalment.The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such that they have never gone out of print.

Dickens's work has been highly praised for its realism, comedy, mastery of prose, unique personalities and concern for social reform, by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton; though others, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, have criticised it for melodrama, sentimentality and implausibility.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Duchess of Cornwall and many of the writer's descendants joined Prince Charles for a service at Westminster Abbey, with the heir to the throne describing the Oliver Twist creator as 'one of the greatest writers of the English language'.

Actor Ralph Fiennes, who is set to star in an adaptation of Great Expectations, read an extract from classic novel Bleak House before the congregation laid a wreath at Poets' Corner where Dickens was buried in 1870.source : www.metro.co.uk

commonly referred to as I. L. Caragiale; February 13 , 1852 – July 9, 1912was a Wallachian-born Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist. He is considered one of the greatest Romanian playwrights and writers, a leading representative of local humor, and a main representative of Junimea, an influential literary society with which he parted during the second half of his life.

So that he could finally be promoted at the end of this school year, grandma, mommy and aunty Mitsa promised to take the young Goe to Bucharest on the King’s anniversary, the 10th of May.

Little do we care if the three dames decide to leave their comfortable spot to come to the capital just to please their son and nephew. It suffices to say that in the early morning, on the central station’s platform in the town of X, the dames, all dressed-up, along with the young Goe, are impatiently waiting for the fast train that is supposed to take them to Bucharest. It is true that once one has decided to assist to such an important national celebration, one must make an early start. The train that they are going to get reaches the north station at ten to eight a.m. Mr. Goe is impatient and he argues in a commanding voice:

Note:Christa Wolf was one of Germany's most influential postwar writers,ﾂ and her works have chronicled life in the former East Germany. She built her literary reputation with Divided Heaven, and The Quest for Christa T. successfully explored the tension between the harsh demands of society and the unquenchable desire of the protagonist for individuality.

Romanian inventor, aerodynamics pioneer and builder of an experimental aircraft, the Coandă-1910 described by Coandă in the mid-1950s as the world's first jet, a controversial claim disputed by some and supported by others. He invented a great number of devices, designed a "flying saucer" and discovered the Coandă effect of fluid dynamics.

Note:This poem is my FIRST Sci-Fi haiku, alluding to Milan Kundera's most famous philosophical novel entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The book is about "two men, two women, a dog and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968."

Note:My haiku alludes to the key ideas explored in the following two passages from Sebald’s final novel entitled Austerlitz, known for“the lack of paragraphing, a digressive style, the blending of fact and fiction, and the inclusion of a set of mysterious and evocative photographs, scattered throughout the book:”

"How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper."

"It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision."

For further information, please read the Wikipedia entry entitled Austerlitz.

twilight deepens ...all those black-and-white photosin Austerlitz

Note:Austerlitz, the last novel by W. G. Sebald, is often regarded as “one of the most significant German language works of fiction for the period since the Second World War.” It’s known for its “curious and wide-ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection and fiction, often punctuated by indistinct black-and-white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly.”

These black-and-white photos inserted in the text read like those on newspaper pages, and artistically speaking, they are an integral part of the novel, mainly used to produce unsettling effects, especially when viewed in the context and themes of the surrounding passages.

reading For Years Now...the whistling sound from afarbreaks this moonless night

Unrecounted...page after page I see thosepeering eyes in words

Note:Although best known as one of the exemplary novelists of the late 20th century, W. G. Sebald also wrote poetry. For Years Now is a book of 23 poems with images provided by visual artist, Tess Jaray. Unrecounted is a book of 33 poems juxtaposed with Jan Peter Tripp's thirty-three lithographs, which could pass for black-and-white photographs of the human eyes. The whole book is viewed by literary critic Andrea Köhler as a poem of gazes.

The poems in both book are extremely short, haiku-like -- as few as five words (including the title that is constantly utilized as the first line of the poem), rarely more than fifteen words -- micropoems, Sebald called them, writes translator Michael Hamburger.

In a letter to Hamburger, Tess Jaray mentioned that" [Sebald] carried a book of Japanese haiku when he brought her the first of these texts – one possible clue to the model that Sebald may have had in mind for [his poems], only to play variations on the model in his own fashion"(Unrecounted, p. 8)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and often regarded as martyr by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Church of England, the Church in Wales and the Episcopal Church (USA).

As one of the founding members of the Confessing Church, he actively participated in the German resistance movement against Nazism. His involvement in the plans to kill Adolf Hitler resulted in his execution by hanging in April 1945, 23 days before the Nazis' surrender. His view of Christianity's role in the secular world has become very influential, exerting great influence and inspiration for Christians of different denominations, including figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.”

Note:As a founding member of the Confessing Church that opposed the ideology of the Nazi regime in its entirety, Dietrich Bonhoeffer not only talked the talk, but also walked the walk.

In 1933 lecture, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” he spoken about the possibility that the church, “not just bandage the victims under the wheel, but rather break the spokes of the wheel itself.”

He was jailed in April 1943 for plotting to kill Hitler, and was subsequently hanged in April 1945, 23 days before the Nazis' surrender.

Bonhoeffer's life as a pastor and theologian who lived as he preached has influenced Christians of different denominations and generations, and his view of God of the gaps, one that sees God as existing in the gaps or aspects of reality, has evoked the heated debates among Christian theologians and scholars in sociology of religion.

An influential German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being." His best-known book,Being and Time (German title: Sein und Zeit), is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century and he has been influential beyond philosophy, in literature, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement with Nazism and statements in support of Adolf Hitler.

Being and Timepublished in 1927, is Heidegger's first academic book. He had been under pressure to publish in order to qualify for Husserl's chair at University of Freiburg and the success of this work ensured his appointment to the post.

"The roots and stems, branches and leaves, blossoms and fruits, luster and color of the flowers in the sky are all the blooming of the flowers in the sky. Sky flowers also produce sky fruits and give out sky seeds.It is this true characteristic of all things.It is this flower characteristic of all things.All things, ultimately unfathomable, are flowers and fruits in the sky.""Flowers in the Sky," Cleary, p. 72.

Dogen's views on being and time are found in his seminal essay"The Time-Being" or "Existence-Time" or "Uji."

"The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time. ...Grass-being, form-being are both time. "- "Moon in a Dewdrop," p. 77.Translated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi.

cherry blossoms falling...Heidegger's Being and Timeemerges in my mind

Note:Best-known for his "existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being, '" Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential German philosophers. And his Being and Time, is often regarded as one of the foundational texts for 20th-century philosophy. The book is "an exploration of the meaning of being as defined by temporality. . . It is an analysis of time as a horizon for the understanding of being."

. . . . .

Heidegger once spent time attempting to translate the Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing, whose authorship is attributed to Laozi) into German, working with his Chinese student Paul Shih-yi Hsaio. Professor Hsaio detailed this experience in his essay entitled "Heidegger and Our Translation of the Tao te Ching," which was collected in Heidegger and Asian thought, pp. 93-104.

Reverend Father Hans Küng (born March 19, 1928, in Sursee, Canton of Lucerne), is a Swiss Catholic priest, controversial theologian, and prolific author. Since 1995 he has been President of the Foundation for a Global Ethic (Stiftung Weltethos). Küng is "a Catholic priest in good standing", but the Vatican has rescinded his authority to teach Catholic theology. Though he had to leave the Catholic faculty, he remained at the University of Tübingen as a professor of Ecumenical Theology, serving as Emeritus Professor since 1996. In spite of not being allowed to teach Catholic theology, neither his bishop nor the Holy See has revoked his priestly faculties.

Note:Reverend Father Hans Küng, born March 19, 1928, is an internationally-acclaimed theologian and Emeritus Professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tübingen. In 1962, along with his colleague Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), he was appointed as an expert theological advisor to members of the Second Vatican Council. Over the decades, he had constantly run into conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church on some doctrinal issues, which resulted in the Vatican's rescinding his authority to teach Catholic theology.

L1 alludes to Matthew 7:13-14:

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

German jurist and writer. He was born in Bethel, Germany, to a German father (Edmund Schlink) and a Swiss mother, the youngest of four children. Both his parents were theology students, although his father lost his job as a Professor of Theology due to the Nazis, and had to settle on being a pastor instead. Bernhard Schlink was brought up in Heidelberg from the age of two. He studied law at West Berlin’s Free University, graduating in 1968.

The book portrays how the post-war German generations wrestle with wartime past, confronting the generation who participated in or witnessed the atrocities against the Jews.Shortly after its publication in the mid-1990s, The Reader became an instant bestseller both in Germany and the USA, and it has been translated into 37 languages. In 2007, it was adapted into a film of the same name. The film was nominated for several major awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Ls 2&3 allude to his 2002 novel, Crabwalk.The book is a compelling account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in January of 1945, the deadliest maritime disaster in history.

The title, described by Grass as "scuttling backward to move forward, refers to both the necessary reference to various events, some occurring at the same time, the same events that would lead to the eventual disaster."

Note:The Tin Drum, first book of Danzig Trilogy, is one of the most highly acclaimed novels by Gunter Grass. It’s about a boy named Oskar who refuses to grow older, and who constantly lashes out at anything he dislikes with screams and poundings on his tin drum.

Note:The poem alludes to Gunter Grass’s 2006 memoir entitled Peeling the Onion. In the book, he shocked Germany and the readers around the word by confessing that “as a youth, late in World War II, he had served in the Nazi Waffen SS.”

The image of peeling the onion also makes a thematic allusion to Chapter 42, The Onion Cellar, of Grass’s most-read novel, The Tin Drum.

quote"But there was neither a bar nor a menu in the Onion Cellar. There was only one thing served in the club. Schmuh would don a silk shawl, disappear, and reappear with a basket on his arm. He would hand out cutting boards, shaped like either pigs or fish, to the customers, then paring knives. Then, he would hand each person an ordinary onion. At the signal, the customers would peel, then cut into the onions. The onions would make their eyes begin to water ...

‘.... it is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow, some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century. It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little cutting board - pig or fish - a pairing knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary, field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice - what did the onion juice do?

It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?’"(p. 525)

First and foremost, I confess I am a Germanophile who can’t read German, but who is willing to do his best to read anything about German literature, cinema, philosophy, theology,... etc.

Why? It’s because I’m a person who is intensely interested in reflective thoroughness. According to Slovenian continental philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “Hegel was among the first to interpret the geographic triad of Germany-France-England as expressing three different existential attitudes: German reflective thoroughness, French revolutionary hastiness, English moderate utilitarian pragmatism.”(By the way, I don’t like Žižek’s use of a toilet analogy to describe these three existential attitudes)

In the 1990s, one of the most tumultuous and ideologically charged eras in the Taiwanese history, everything was easily reduced to support for or opposition to Taiwan Independence. Through reading and living in an identity-seeking society at the time, my worldview was influenced by European existentialism, postcolonial literature, and Taiwan native soil literature, a literary movement that arose in opposition to both mainland-centered governmental geopolitics and the West-oriented modernist movement. I constantly asked myself the following questions: in what contexts were my identities situated? What kind of life would I like to live fully?

I stared reading the Bible, Bible commentaries, and theologies for and against the Bible. Eventually, I found out that any account of the development of modern theology has been largely centered on Germany and on those most influenced by German-language theology and philosophy.(For further information, read The Modern Theologians: An Introduction To Christian Theology Since 1918, edited by David F Ford Rachel Muers, pp. 1-16)

My love affairs with Germany began with my reading of theological writings by Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans Küng, later I studied their philosophical/literary roots, then slipped and fell into the magic net of New German Cinema . . .

The haiku/senryu posted here are my story poems that narrate my captivity among these German giants

Chen-ou Liu was born in Taiwan and emigrated to Canada in 2002. He lives in a suburb of Toronto, where he continues to struggle with a life in transition and translation.

Chen-ou Liu is the author of the forthcoming book, entitled Ripples from a Splash: A Collection of Essays on Haiku with Award-Winning Haiku, and a contributing writer for Rust+Moth. His poetry has been published and anthologized worldwide. His tanka and haiku have been honored with 10 awards, including Grand Prix in the 2010 Klostar Ivanic Haiku Contest in English, 特選 (Prize Winner) in the 12th Haiku International Association Haiku Contest, and Tanka Third Place in the 2009 San Francisco International Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay Competition.Read more of his poems on his poetry blogPoetry in the Momenthttp://chenouliu.blogspot.com/

Sophia Magdalena Scholl was a German student, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich with her brother Hans. As a result, they were both executed by guillotine.

Note:According to Dr. Frank McDonough, Sophie Scholl’s religious faith played an important role in her decision to oppose the Nazi regime. “Though she was Lutheran, the White Rose was founded after Scholl and others read a stern anti-Nazi sermon by Cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen (the "Lion of Münster"), the Roman Catholic Bishop of Münster.”For further information, please read the Wikipedia entry entitled Sophie Scholl,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl